


Dieu vous bénisse (God bless you)

by orphan_account



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Backstory, Bastogne, Eugene's not sure he's doing his job, French, Gen, Pre-Slash, traiteurs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-26
Updated: 2013-02-26
Packaged: 2017-12-03 16:20:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/700229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Like you, huh?” Babe smirked, pale skin pink with the cold. </p><p>Eugene’s frown fixed deep on his dark brow and he smiled in a manner that Babe would have catagorised as ‘sarcastic’. “Nuh uh, I ain’t a healer - I can’t...I can’t do what she did, I can’t stop the death here.” </p><p>“It’s war, Doc,” Babe jumped in, “Death can’t be stopped.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dieu vous bénisse (God bless you)

**Author's Note:**

> Liberties taken with Roe's backstory: centered around the characters created by HBO and no disrespect meant to the men themselves.  
> Could be considered pre-slash Baberoe...

The night had been quiet and bright thanks to the stars in the cloudless sky glistening on every inch of the snow-covered wood. The quiet wasn’t as calming as it should have been - Easy was on alert; the quiet scared them almost as much as a constant raining-down of shells.

“C’mon then, Doc,” 

Babe’s voice breaking suddenly brought Eugene’s heartrate up a token before slowly ebbing back to a normal rhythm. He turned his head an inch, just to take in the young man’s face, brows rising up slightly. 

“What brought you here?” Heffron’s South Philly twang was tinged with an edge of extreme fatigue that he, and the rest of Easy, were trying hard to fight. Still, it sounded as sunny as it usually did and when he moved, clutching his gun closer, Eugene drew down the corners of his mouth ever so slightly in contemplation. “Me,” Babe answered his own question, “I’m here because I wanted fight for America, for the freedom to be...,” he shrugged and then laughed. “I’m here because I answered an add in Life magazine.” he stated, turning to face Eugene fully. “Different in Philly to Louisiana I bet.” 

“Quieter?” Eugene supplied in his slow, southern drawl, one side of his mouth crooking to a slight smile when Babe’s eyes displayed discontent at his reply. “I don’t know, Heffron,” he pressed on, his chin dug down into his the collar of his inadequate coat. “I guess I figured I could help, y’know? Figured I oughta put myself up while I was still young and help others.” 

Babe nodded, his chin creasing as he tugged his bottom lip down and nodded in appreciation of Eugene’s reply, not doubting for one moment that there was absolute truth behind the words. “You miss home?” 

“Doesn’ everyone?” Eugene replied a little too quickly. “This is home for the time being, Heffron, I gotta get that into my head same as you, same as the rest of the people fightin’ this war; there ain’t no home until it’s over, y’know? There ain’t no home but the one we got here.” 

The French depth to his accent seemed to deepen when Eugene was passionate, seemed to kick further in and roll words from his tongue as though he were about to start speaking in a foreign tongue that would leave Babe awestruck, perhaps romanticised and just a little confused. Babe knew nothing but English and a few choice words in German, just like a large portion of Easy Company. 

“Tell me about Louisiana.” Babe broke in, watching above him as snow began to fall lightly. He knew it wouldn’t be long until the soft, fluffy flakes were settling in large, freezing mounds and Easy would feel as though they were once again in a photoshoot for a Christmas greetings card. “I bet it’s real hot in the summertime!” Babe’s teeth showed as he smiled, looking out at the line. He heard Eugene exhale and chanced a glance, quick enough to spot a real, if small and fleeting, smile across the Medic’s lips. 

“Yep,” Eugene replied bluntly but without intention of cutting the conversation short: blunt and honest, short and unattached - it was just Doc’s way. Babe, though, was almost surprised when he heard the medic’s deep voice continue on in something altogether more open. 

“When I was young, I’d spend the weekends with my Grandparents. They sorta had land, the house was built right up on a large stretch that must have been a plantation or somethin’ at some point, but when I was a kid up there with my folks in the summer, my Grandad he just tended the grass and grew vegetables, like a normal garden in the country. The sun would be high all day and my Grandmother, she’d make lemonade and my Ma and Pa would come pick me up in the evening and we’d all have dinner together.” He smiled, really briefly and painfully sad, something that didn’t go an inch past his lips - far too far to lighten his eyes.

Babe watched him, transfixed by how his mouth moved and the sweet lilt of his voice. There was something soothing about listening to Eugene speak: his dialect sometimes made him sound uneducated but it was clear from his manner, from the words he used and the way he talked with such feeling when at last he spoke about something other than the welfare of those around him, Eugene was both educated and streetwise: he had a mature head on his shoulders and he was still such a young man. 

“Then when my Grandad died, my Grandmother sorta lost her strength. They say people, and I mean just a few people, when they live their whole lives with one person, they can die of a broken heart - I think that’s true. I don’t know if that’s what happened to my Grandmother, but she died soon after my Grandad and there hadn’t been much wrong with her before. My Ma, she always said it was because she absorbed too much hurtin’ from everyone else’s lives that she just couldn’t take a bit of her own.” 

Babe watched Eugene’s eyes with a frown set on his own brow: when he spoke, when he opened up, he looked more lost than he did sitting in the middle of gunfire. Babe was certain he’d never heard more than four words a go out of Eugene’s mouth and now here he was, front and centre to the guy’s past and, like many men here, it wasn’t all roses despite what the others teased him about being from the country. 

“Your Grandma,” Babe spoke into a silence that Eugene let hang, whether it was intentional or not Babe couldn’t work out. “This is your mother’s Mom?” Eugene nodded softly. “You’re Cajun on your Mom’s side then, huh.” He pieced the Doc’s life together verbally. “And your Grandma, she was one of them healers, yeah?” 

“Traiteurs.” Eugene's tongue lapped around the French word and he nodded, the sadness lifting or at least he hid it well enough to continue what he assumed Babe needed: his company. “She was a Traiteuse - laid her hands on people and cured ‘em.” 

“She really did that?” Babe asked, a frown sending his russet browns tumbling down his forehead with two, neat wrinkles. 

“Uh huh,” Eugene nodded, a little pride and a little sadness clouding his eyes despite his attempts to disguise it. 

“Like you, huh?” Babe smirked, pale skin pink with the cold. 

Eugene’s frown fixed deep on his dark brow and he smiled in a manner that Babe would have catagorised as ‘sarcastic’. “Nuh uh, I ain’t a healer - I can’t...I can’t do what she did, I can’t stop the death here.” 

“It’s war, Doc,” Babe jumped in, “Death can’t be stopped.” 

“I know that,” Eugene nodded, slow and steady, voice low and muffled as his lips barely parted to let the words out. “I just mean - I mean I’m not like her; she could save people and I can’t offer that, I don’t have the right to ask God for that. We are men at war, Heffron, we are fightin’ and it might be righteous, it might be for the greater good, but we are fightin’ and what good has ever come from warin’?” 

Babe regarded the medic and wondered how old he was, really. He wondered if Gene had seen life, kissed a woman, touched a breast, tasted a beer when it was legal to do so. Wondered if he thought the way he did, if he’d finished school, if he’d worked hard before enlisting. Mostly he wondered if there was a reason for the pensive, painful expression he wore as his default. “Freedom.” Babe replied, eventually, voice unsure but face certain and set. “Freedom.” 

“If they dead,” Eugene turned slightly, accent thick and throat gruff, “...then they ain’t free. My Ma raised me to love God, Heffron; she raised me to pray and be thankful to the Lord for the gift of waking up every morning - I’d open my eyes and be thankful I didn’t die in my sleep and I’ve been more thankful for every morning every one of us has woken up and there’ve been no deaths and even when there are, even when they die, I pray and I ask God to take their soul because - goddamnit - they didn’t ask to be here, not really, they didn’t ask to be fightin’.” 

Babe could feel the tremble from the medic’s body where their legs touched. He wanted to say something, do something, calm him down but he didn’t know what or how, he didn’t even know what it was that was making him so riled up. All Babe had done was ask about home. 

“I ask God to take their souls to Heaven and let them be and I know he listens, but I can’t ask him to heal them like my Grandmother used to because I’m here; I’m in this war too Heffron and that means that me, that I’m part of the goddamned problem.” Gene finished with a shake of his head, brow still frowning deeply against the bridge of his nose, making his entire expression pinched and painful. 

“Problem? What problem? This is Hitler’s problem, Doc, not ours. We’re here for the peace, for liberation...” 

“We wield guns.” Eugene submitted.

“You don’t.” Babe points out, “Worst thing you have on you is the goddamned morphine! You’re the angel of mercy in all this, Doc - you’re the man of peace.” 

For a moment the pair fell quiet, snow falling around them and the sky alight with stars. Silence was golden but frightening and dangerous. Every foxhole around them had two or three men inside and none were detectable by sound: everything was muted. 

Eugene mouthed Babes words silently: man of peace. 

He didn’t feel wholly peaceful: bombs, blood, screaming and pain - what had he done to promote peace anywhere since leaving England? He spent his time feeling edgy and jittering, desperate to be needed and hating the feeling of failure when he was needed and couldn’t do anything to help. He’d managed to distance himself some from the rest of the company, sitting close but never quite included in the jokes and mocking. Everybody had immense respect for him, that much he knew, but he didn’t know whether it was because he deserved it through his acts or because they knew when it came to the end, it’d be him who’d be there for them, with them when everyone else was acting as a line of defense. 

“If you’re prayin’ for us all so hard,” Babe spoke after the quiet became too thick to bear, “...I’ll bet God’s listening enough to give you all the help you need. I’ll bet you can be a traitor just like your Grandma.” 

“Traiteuse,” Roe smirked, tongue curving into his teeth. “Say it,” he nodded, his feelings of inadequacy pushed aside in amusement at the young man from Philadelphia and, somewhere, he considered if Babe wanted it that way. “Tray-turrs.”

In a thick, South of the water brawl Babe repeated his mentor, “Tray-tors,” he put on a falsified, over-acted French accent, drawing a brief but genuine smile from the medic. “I think I could do it, you know,” Babe pressed on, digging further into his coat and scarf, shuddering from the cold. “Cause you know, whenever I lay hands on myself I feel mighty fine!” he let out an immature laugh and Doc’s smile was broader this time, shaking his head in discontent at the red-head. 

“Seriously, Doc,” Babe coughed and sobered quickly, “You bring peace, taking away the pain and fear when people are dying - even if you don’t save them, don’t save their life. You still kind of do.” 

Eugene’s eyes watched the young man intently, frown back in place, as Babe stared out upon the twilight-illuminated line. “Dieu vous bénisse, Heffron.”


End file.
